This album is the highlights of a charity gig in Athens, Georgia on September 12, 2006, and the net proceeds of your $15 will go into the pot that they started that night. If you're reading this as a card-carrying member of the R.E.M. fan club, then you've already heard a few things from the gig because you got them as a Christmas present, but they're not on this record, so you won't be paying for what you already got free.
The trick to covering famous songs is that you've got to decide whether you're going to play it straight or try to do something adventurous, or at least try to make the song your own in some way. R.E.M. have done quite a few interesting covers over the years because they choose iconic songs and turn them into R.E.M. songs. The most successful renditions on this album do the R.E.M. strategy on R.E.M.
Here's a song-by-song account each of them:
The album opens with Liz Durrett doing a slightly Mazzy Star-ish version of "The One I Love".
Claire Campbell does a banjo-tastic rendition of "Wendell Gee", wonderfully turning it into a mountain folk song. This is a contender for best song on the album.
Tin Cup Prophette do a somewhat unimaginative rendition of "Leave", and because I'm a cretin I'm going to write that Modern Skirts turn "Perfect Circle" into an Elton John song, which is only sort of true, and I'm saying it mostly because it features piano as the lead instrument. But it would've been cool if they'd thrown a few "rollin' like thun-dah!s" in there, just for fun.
Bain Mattox covers "Finest Worksong", "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville" and "Fall on Me". The first sounds like Monster-era R.E.M., the second I will describe with the same Elton John shorthand I used for Modern Skirts, even though it means a little less here than it did the first time. "Fall on Me" is the most adventurous of the three, a pace- and volume-changing lament.
The Observatory take a slow-it-down approach to the superb "Underneath the Bunker" and they also have wind and string instruments (the orchestra kind, not just guitars), which they also make wonderful use of as they medley straight into "Pilgrimage", then onto "Feeling Gravitys Pull" without a pause for breath, a terrific chaos of horns and guitar noise. Hooray.
Patterson Hood gives us "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)", which doesn't sound like the original but does sound like R.E.M. "Burning Hell" is barroom rock 'n' roll. "Second Guessing" and "Belong" fall into the the previous category, and has Mike Mills doing what he does best (backing vocals—I've long considered him the champion at this art form).
Five-Eight's first song is "Fiver Eight" (see what they've done there?). But he's changed the lyrics so he's singing about opening up for R.E.M. and he's playing the banjo and so of course it's funny and it's terrific and a bit like Daniel Johnston maybe, and it also lets loose the secret that Woody Harrelson isn't proud of Kingpin. "Leaving New York" doesn't have a banjo but is still good. "Radio Free Europe" has Mike Mills and Peter Buck, which strikes me as cheating, but whatever. It pretty much faithfully duplicates the original, albeit faster.
The album ends with a million people singing some song I've never heard before about the end of the world and feeling fine, whatever that's supposed to mean. Leonard Bernstein!
So let's all run up to The Observatory and look at the stars, and hold Claire Campbell's hand while we gaze through the telescope, tapping our feet in Five-Eight.
There's lots of information about the album, including videos of some of the performances at www.finestworksongs.com.